Matthews H Damon, Zickfeld Kirsten, Koch Alexander, Luers Amy
Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Nat Commun. 2023 Sep 7;14(1):5485. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-41242-5.
Nature-based climate solutions can contribute to climate mitigation, but the vulnerability of land carbon to disturbances means that efforts to slow or reverse land carbon loss could result in only temporary storage. The challenge of accounting for temporary storage is a key barrier to the implementation of nature-based climate mitigation strategies. Here we offer a solution to this challenge using tonne-year accounting, which integrates the amount of carbon over the time that it remains in storage. We show that tonne-years of carbon storage are proportional to degree-years of avoided warming, and that a physically based tonne-year accounting metric could effectively quantify and track the climate benefit of temporary carbon storage. If the world can sustain an increasing number of tonne-years alongside rapid fossil fuel CO emissions reductions, then the resulting carbon storage (even if only temporary) would have considerable and lasting climate value by lowering the global temperature peak.
基于自然的气候解决方案有助于缓解气候变化，但陆地碳对干扰的脆弱性意味着，减缓或扭转陆地碳损失的努力可能只会带来临时存储。核算临时存储的挑战是实施基于自然的气候缓解策略的关键障碍。在此，我们使用吨年核算为这一挑战提供了一个解决方案，该方法整合了碳在存储期间的总量。我们表明，碳存储的吨年数与避免升温的度年数成正比，并且基于物理的吨年核算指标可以有效地量化和跟踪临时碳存储的气候效益。如果世界能够在快速减少化石燃料碳排放的同时维持越来越多的吨年数，那么由此产生的碳存储（即使只是临时的）将通过降低全球温度峰值而具有可观且持久的气候价值。
